Jobs Report Shows Improvement

The federal government today released its jobs report for November and there's some good news there.

The economy added 146,000 jobs in November and the unemployment rate fell to 7.7 percent, its lowest level since December 2008, the government said today in a report that was complicated by special factors of weather and politics. Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist for Capital Economics, described the report as “something of a mixed bag” but said “on balance, it’s positive.” The drop in the jobless rate, from 7.9 percent in October, wasn’t great news because of why it happened: More people dropped out of the labor force so they weren’t counted among the unemployed. The labor-force participation rate remains depressed more than three years after the end of the 2007-09 recession. If it were at normal levels, the unemployment rate would be substantially higher.

The bad news is that today's report revised the numbers for the last two months in a downward direction. The number of new jobs added in October was reduced from 171,000 to 138,000. If that lower figure had been reported before the election....